You are currently browsing the monthly archive for July 2009.
If I don’t write about the weekend workshop every second I find using every medium possible, I’m afraid I’ll lose it. I took copious notes, though, not just on everything everyone said during the workshop sessions, but on my own responses to everything, everything.
I make a dreadful noise here, no explanation of what I’m going on about. Worse, I end a sentence with a preposition.
Here’s what this is about: I had the chance to attend a very intimate workshop with the lovely dancer/poet Diane Frank this past weekend in San Francisco. (author of such books as Entering the Word Temple and the the Pulitzer finalist novel Blackberries in the Dream House)
There. That should be enough to make this a little more connected to … what? Reality?
this is probably just part one of 70 million parts.
a few things I loved:
* I loved every single poet in the room at every moment they were in the room (and beyond) plus the Diane’s cellist partner Erik (who graciously allowed 11 strange women and one man (a friend of his/theirs and a harpist) to invade his house and drink his tea).
* my friend/poet/traveling companion who doesn’t hate me even after I snapped at her yesterday early morning a couple of times on our way back home.
* the goosebumps that rose on my arm when I heard exquisite “drafts” of the poets’ poems.
* the goosebumps that rose on my arms when another poet read my own poem back to me and I heard something … well. I heard another woman inside the poem who was familiar to me, but unfamiliar, and the goosebumps rose because I realized who I was hearing, and I … well, I guess I can’t quite articulate that part yet (maybe I need even more than 12 hours of sleep). and the goosebumps also rose because they fucking liked the poem, and I had had no clue that it was any good at all.
(pardon my cussing. that’s part of who I continue to be and I choose not to stop right now because I just don’t wanna. pfft!)
* I loved the fact that our hotel sucked so much but was, at least, clean and safe.
* Muir Woods.
* walking.
* walking.
* the beach
* the glimpses of the ocean that I got between fits of fog.
* the fog (I was the only person who loved the fog)
* the chill air.
* the heat during the San Francisco Symphony’s free performance.
* the San Francisco Symphony.
* the crazy little man who did an impromptu “performance” just before the real performance (he really was mentally off, but darling)
* the fact that I didn’t get heat stroke.
* my body.
* the different voices I heard all weekend from the other poets to the bass violin (dude! you with the white hair, ponytail and sunglasses. If you’re not already taken, I want to marry you even though I claim I’m never doing that again) to the trolley cars’ wheels on tracks to the shuttle drivers’ accents to the shriek of the espresso machine in the coffee shop next door to our ratty hotel…… (oh. here is a poem possibility, huh?).
* Diane’s car.
I’ll stop for now. I need to drink more coffee, get dressed (yes, I am still in my pajamas, the clean pair I had saved for last night), shift clothes from washer to dryer, etc., etc., life things, etc.
My Girl comes back to me today! (oh, breath!)
Golly. What a fucking amazing time I had!
(reminder: this is not a blog; it’s a journal.)
Daughter is now at her dad’s until next Tuesday, July 21, when I return from the poetry workshop I’m attending this weekend.
The profound, impossible silence (except for a neighbor’s lawn mower) worries me. Can I focus around that silence?
I have had what I can only think of as a “gentle epiphany” this past week. This “epiphany” has changed my attitude toward myself, my work, my relationships, my role in my small world. But I am the same person with the same bad habits and the same way of rolling out of bed too late in the morning after sleeping badly at night, the same bad habit of starting my morning in the afternoon when my girl is gone, of feeling sorry for myself because I have to let her go to her father’s.
I have to get over myself.
I have a shitload of things to do between now and Friday morning when I drive my friend and myself to the airport for our flight to San Francisco.
God. I can’t wait.
But I’m also excited about the work I’ll do this week on my novel and on poems I will bring to share (eep! I hate workshopping my poems. Dear God, please help me to be brave and open, brave and open, brave and open.), work to do on my dreadfully messy house, maybe even on my yard.
My Girl’s dad has volunteered to attend tomorrow night’s band boosters meeting at the high school, and I will let him happily since I am so, so busy.
I just wish my busy led to some kind of income.
It’s funny how just typing through my loneliness when my Girl is newly gone helps alleviate that loneliness.
All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close up.
(reminder: this is not a blog; it’s a journal.)
I love my daughter. I love teenagers. One of my gifts is the ability (and willingness) to see the person inside the age or despite the age or through, around, because of the age. Girls are easier for me because I have a daughter. The boys are a little skittish around me until they figure out that, really, I have no ulterior motive when I choose to talk to them. I’m simply interested in them the way I’m interested in people in general (unless I’m feeling ugly and reclusive or shy and reclusive or pissy and reclusive).
That said, they are driving me mad, mad, I say.
I’d say I can’t wait for Aug. 24 when school starts again, but they all begin high school in the fall, and that’s scarier than allowing gaggles of teenagers to hang out in my house together.
It’s time to put yourself on the shelf, so to speak (whatever “so to speak” means), and put the Work out there. You don’t matter. The Work matters. If you want to share the Work, you have to put it into the hands of people you trust to help you fix what’s wrong, accept that what’s right is right.
In other words, chica, let it go. Trust your friends to be kind but honest. Trust them to believe in you as writer, in the Work as valuable or at least somewhat entertaining.
Trust them to help you finish because you have to finish.
Get out of your own way. Admit you have an ego and then have a talk with your ego, calm her down, tell her these people are NOT your mother and they will not purposely hurt your feelings to get you used to being criticized when you share your creative work.
(that’s right. blame your fear on your dead mother. Always works for me!)
It will be fine. Even if your trusted friends hate this project you’ve been writing for WAY too long, it will be fine. It’s work that matters and the process of writing it has led to other work that matters more. It’s all practice. Sending it out there, letting it go, that’s practice, too. Process, practice, purpose.
Take a deep breath and decide that the Work is worth sharing, and you are worth the Work.
Love,
me
- Novel stuff was going well until my daughter shook herself out of her artistic haze and started plotting social events again
- I am feeling an irrational conflict between wanting to be so reclusive I never talk to a soul again and wanting to shout, loudly in my most obnoxious voice, HEY! YOU! OVER HERE! LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! YOU OWE ME BECAUSE I’VE BEEN LOOKING AT YOU!”
- It’s supposed to rain tomorrow, and, yes, we were planning to join the city’s Fourth of July festivities down at the river park.
- I confess that I’m one of those weird people who sets aside my loathing of crowds and knowledge of how terrible fireworks are for the environment to ooh and ahh when they burst into color after I’ve been wandering, hot, through the masses.
- It might be cool enough tomorrow for me to get away with wearing jeans instead of dashing out today to buy a new pair shorts (my ass spreads relentlessly as I approach 51).
- I think we’re going to have an overnight guest tomorrow. As long as the girls let me sleep at least five hours, I suppose I’m OK with that.
- Do you ever feel that you might have done something to annoy someone or piss off someone to the point where they just don’t want to talk to you any more, but you’ve been so reclusive you can’t even think what that might possibly have been and then you realize that maybe it’s the “being reclusive” business that pisses people off, but you can’t imagine that they would really even care all that much when you disappear, but, really, you want them to care because you care when they disappear, and you realize that thinking this way is a massive waste of energy and you think you’re hungry for some grapes, so you decide that you’ve spent enough time on this list and just….
…quit?
(reminder: this is not a blog; it’s a journal.)
If I don’t ignore you while I write this,
I will never get it written.
You are what matters
ultimately
but not right now.
I can only give you what you want
if I finish
and I can’t finish
if I imagine
that you are reading over my shoulder
rolling your eyes
at my sentence fragments
redundancies
awkward clannish symptoms….
what?
my daughter still sleeps
I think
she stayed up until at least 2 or 3
drawing
I think
I have been working
at trying not to imagine you
reading over my shoulder.
Ah. She’s up,
telling me that her friend’s boyfriend drama
is driving her crazy.
She did draw until 3:40 a.m.
silly kid
while trying to help her obsessed friend
get over her suspicions
that her boyfriend
loves another girl
(He is 14. Of course he loves another girl!
He loves all girls).
(reminder: this is not a blog; it’s a journal.)
My girl’s father had his surgery. It was the “belly” surgery to remove the cancer there, not the spot on his cheek. It turns out the doctor got all of the cancer on his cheek when she did the biopsy, so he doesn’t need to have the second surgery next week.
I think it’s all right if I let myself cry a little with relief. Yes, we are permanently separated, my husband and I. I cannot be with him because I can’t be what he needs. He can’t stop needing what he needs. Even though he doesn’t understand it because he knows I’m splendid, he’s just not that into me.
But he’s my good, dear forever friend, and I’m so glad things will be OK despite the inch and a half scar on his belly, despite the certainty that more little skin cancers will crop up in his future (it’s a family thing. In my family, we suspect we will die somewhat young because our parents each died at 68 – well, younger brother and I at least since we have both sets of bad genes and I have just gone off on an incoherent tangent born of relief born of fear born of love and regret and … and not regret….).
My poetry teacher sent an email telling those of us in her July 17 workshop in San Francisco that she is going forward with the weekend, that even though she has been quiet since her father’s memorial (he died June 18), she’s been writing a lot and has some excellent ideas about what she will do with us when we get there.
This decision of hers to go ahead with the retreat despite her grief is also cause for (selfish) relief.
I need this poetry retreat. If she had canceled, I would have been going on a vacation, but one without my daughter. And right now, that’s no vacation at all. This “working retreat” is perfect.
The third relief is that my daughter’s little insane gathering didn’t happen after all. She never reached Mustache Guy. Of course the plotting and planning will begin again for Sunday.
I may just have to run away from home.
But in a good way.
(reminder: this is not a blog; it’s a journal)
We are on hold.
We have been on hold since before noon.
The hold holds fast and will not let go.
Plans fall through but the teens are reluctant to admit it, hold on to failed plans.
Silly penguins.
My daughter planned to have her best friend, her best friend’s “secret” boyfriend and my daughter’s “ex-boyfriend” who has been her good friend since fifth-grade come over to hang out. The balance needed to be exact.
The good ex (Mustache Boy) is unreachable by text, by phone, by carrier pigeon. He was at his mom’s, no his dad’s, no, he is now nowhere.
Because Mustache Boy is unavailable, the whole event is crashing. It just won’t work, my Girl tells me, if she is stuck here with her best friend (who is slightly evil) and her best friend’s “secret” boyfriend. They would leave her out.
Plus, the “secret” boyfriend, gorgeous though he is, is rather dull.
Mustache Guy is hilarious and weird, perfect for my kid (he dumped her because he felt that he was cheating on her when he let another girl kiss him. My kid got over it quickly because, well, my kid chooses to get over things rather than hang suspended in inaction and self-pity. I could take a lesson from her).
The 1 p.m. “deadline” has passed, and I’m famished, so famished that I’m willing to head to Burger King for terrible fast food that will increase the size of my ass and make my skin look even older.
I have done no work on the novel because I have been waiting around to find out if I’m going to be indulging in my only hobby (you know, driving my kid and her friends from here to there).
Oh well.
Is it August yet?
shoebox filled with old bills and receipts
another shoebox filled with mechanical and colored pencils
girl’s bells in gig bag
piano books
dust
old VHS tapes in a Century Resources (?) box
an empty Amazon box that kitty uses as toy
flip flops
stepper
more flip flops
a fly swatter
a box of Wet Swiffer wipes
my niece’s shower invitation (from a month ago)
two Lowe’s coupons
small camera bag
girl’s computer bag
a tiny amp
a stack of sketch books with a middle school year book on top
a dusty, out of tune electric guitar on its stand that I never play
four “junk” baskets, or five if you count the one I see from here in the dining nook (the junk is spilling over the edges of this one)
I’ll tap into this list of ordinary things later to build a scene in a poem or story.
If I were a smart woman, I’d go back into my study with my laptop, put headphones over my ears and listen to, say, Imogen Heap or Garbage’s “Bleed Like Me” (which is kind of a theme album for my project.
Instead, my daughter and I sit in the living room together after a bad dinner (we were famished), television is on, girl perches on one arm of the sofa, I feel like ripping off my eyelids.
Not really. We’ve been in different parts of the house today, and I like that we’re sitting together now, not talking, but together.
I have work to do. The work is stuck in my head. No, that’s not quite right. It’s not “stuck.” I just need to find a little quiet focus to let it loose.
No. I’m too distracted even for this crap. But I’m happy to watch my daughter’s expressions when something funny lands on the television screen.
